Lessons in product leadership and AI strategy from Glean, Google, Amazon, and Slack

Tamar Yehoshua, president of product and technology at Glean and former chief product officer at Slack, shares lessons from her career across Google, Amazon, Slack and Glean. The conversation covers career habits, company chaos versus success, cross-functional partnership, AI's impact on product work, and building non-deterministic AI products.

01Key learnings

• Excel in your current role before chasing the next one; advancement follows demonstrated impact, not just hitting goals or launching features.
• Evaluate a potential employer's engineering partner before joining, since great ideas that can't be built lead nowhere.
• Don't assume a company must be well run to succeed; hyper-growth firms often run chaotically, but prioritize companies whose chaos you can tolerate.
• Skip rigid five-year career plans; instead follow the people you most respect and go where you will learn the most, since skills persist even when companies fail.
• Choose workplaces where you can attract and grow talent, since hiring great people there will make their careers.
• Don't over-index on vocal users who dislike changes; design for the larger future user base, and communicate changes transparently and authentically.
• Prototype aggressively and build an engineering setup that makes throwaway prototypes cheap, as Stewart Butterfield pushed for at Slack.
• Use AI tools daily and experiment with them, such as feeding long community transcripts into a model or giving prompts a role, to free up time for strategic, creative product work.

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.